Thursday, April 9, 2009

Just today replaced my 7200rpm drive on my main dev laptop with a 160G Intel X25-M SSD. Been drooling over this since it came out, and my expectations were very high. Two words: holy crap. In just about every way, it's as fast as I hoped. Some of the high points:

- Boot time (Server 2008): 15sec, down from 45sec.- SQL Server 2005 Database restore (30G DB): 9min, down from 45min.- Query large SQL Server table (3m rows) on an unindexed column: 20sec, down from 3min- VS2008 load of our main .sln: 13sec, down from 50sec- Full rebuild of our main .sln: 39sec, down from 1min 15sec.

The rebuild didn't go down as much as I'd hoped, but then I tried doing it DURING the large DB restore mentioned above. Wow! Previously, my machine was completely useless during the DB restore. With the SSD, the restore chugged away, and the full rebuild took 45s, only 6s longer than an "unloaded" machine.

Overall the machine is very snappy feeling, and app startups are noticeably faster. I did the February pre-SP2 hotfix rollup for Outlook 2007, which contains a bunch of SSD-friendly fixes, it's also very snappy now even with my bloated mailbox.

Really pleased with the first day performance. Hopefully it holds out- I'm almost planning on needing to do an image-wipe-restore process every couple of months (to combat the well-documented internal fragmentation slowdowns), but we'll see how these metrics hold up over time first.